Dr. Li Wan wins ERC Starting Grant
The European Research Council (ERC) has announced the awardees for the 2024 Starting Grants. One of these prestigious grants, worth 2.16 million Euros, is awarded to Dr. Li Wan, postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle. His ERC grant “FastE-Chiral” will explore new materials and devices for fast generation and modulation of chiral light signals, that could lead to new optoelectronics and communication technologies.
This significant recognition marks the second ERC starting grant hosted by the institute, underlining its leading position in advanced research. The FastE-Chiral project focuses on experimental generation, control and manipulation of circularly polarized light signals using pure organic semiconductor materials. Moreover, by developing new chiral optoelectronic devices, the project aims to reveal the relationships between chiral materials, the transport behavior of charge carriers, and spin-active photonics.
“Chirality is a fundamental asymmetry in nature. Chiral objects have unique properties that prevent them from overlapping with their mirror images. This asymmetry grants chiral materials the ability to directly emit circularly polarized light—a special form of light with a rotating electric field along its propagation—without any external optics. Depending on the rotation direction, these light signals are encoded with rich optical information that electronic devices can read and process in communication technologies. Our goal is to develop new materials and devices to extend this concept from generating chiral light to flexibly controlling and precisely modulating these chiral signals,” explains Wan.
Chiral light emission in organic optoelectronic devices is a ‘current-in, light-out’ process. Precise control of the light requires a crucial current operation, which significantly impacts light generation performance. Recently, Wan and his collaborators discovered that chiral organic semiconductors can lock a charge’s orbital angular momentum with its direction of movement. This means it is now possible to control and manipulate chiral emission polarization through the direction of current flow. This finding offers an entirely new approach to controlling chiral light signals in optoelectronic devices.
The majority of the grant will finance postdoctoral research fellows and Ph.D. students to collaborate with Li Wan on this research program, who comments “Receiving this ERC Starting Grant is a great honor and I am so excited to freely explore the fast-evolving chiral light technology. and establish my research group over the next five years.”
About the Starting Grant of the ERC
The fundamental activity of the ERC is to provide attractive, long-term funding to support excellent investigators and their research teams to pursue groundbreaking, high-gain/high-risk research. Due to the high level of competition and the focus on research excellence, a successful application to the European Research Council is very prestigious.
In the current application round, the European Research Council has awarded Starting Grants to 494 scientists based across Europe with 2-7 years of experience since the completion of their Ph.D. Each grant will enable the high-profile researchers and their teams to pursue their project ideas which are considered excellent.
A total of 3,474 research proposals reached the ERC in the last round of Starting Grants, of which 14.2 percent were approved. The ERC provides 780 million euros for this purpose, from the EU Framework Program for Research and Innovation Horizon Europe.
About the ERC
The ERC, set up by the European Union in 2007, is the premier European funding organization for excellent frontier research. It funds creative researchers of any nationality and age, to run projects based across Europe. The ERC offers four core grant schemes: Starting Grants, Consolidator Grants, Advanced Grants, and Synergy Grants. With its additional Proof of Concept Grant scheme, the ERC helps grantees to bridge the gap between their pioneering research and early phases of its commercialisation. The ERC is led by an independent governing body, the Scientific Council. Maria Leptin has been the President of the ERC since November 2021. The overall ERC budget from 2021 to 2027 is more than €16 billion, as part of the Horizon Europe programme, under the responsibility of European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, Iliana Ivanova.
(KW)
